Archive for October, 2008

well today, oct 30, DERA helped re-establish a tent site for a few homeless on Glen, in Vancouver’s East Side on an empty city lot from which they had been kicked earlier this week. The city has not responded to the requests to find housing for these people, and despite threats tonight they are staying on that city lot until they recieve word on where they are to be housed.

During a court ruling earlier this month, testimony was given as to the dangers of sleeping on the street, such as hypothermia, and trench foot. These people are: in an act of desperation, attempting to keep what little shelter over their heads as is possible without housing; in order to protect themselves from the elements until that housing is provided.

As you can see from this 1886 archival picture, Vancouver City hall has even found itself run by homeless immigrants who lived in a tent city.!

The RAND Corporation is a notoriously powerful NGO with deep ties to the U.S. military-industrial complex as well as interlocking connections with the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations.

According to reports at PrisonPlanet which translated top Chinese mainstream news outlets, the RAND Corporation recently presented a proposal to the Pentagon in which it lobbied for a war to be started with a major foreign power in an attempt to stimulate the American economy and prevent a recession.

The reports cite French media news sources as having uncovered the proposal, in which RAND suggested that the $700 billion dollars that has been earmarked to bailout Wall Street and failing banks instead be used to finance a new war which would in turn re-invigorate the flagging stock markets.

China’s biggest media outlet, Sohu.com, speculated that the target of the new war would probably be China or Russia, but that it could also be Iran or another middle eastern country. Japan was also mentioned as a potential target for the reason that Japan holds the most U.S. debt. North Korea was considered as a target but ruled out because the scale of such a war would not be large enough for RAND’s requirements.

Two white supremacists allegedly plotted to go on a national killing spree, shooting and decapitating black people and ultimately targeting Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, federal authorities said Monday.

In all, the two men whom officials describe as neo-Nazi skinheads planned to kill 88 people — 14 by beheading, according to documents unsealed in U.S. District Court in Jackson, Tenn. The numbers 88 and 14 are symbolic in the white supremacist community.

The spree, which initially targeted an unidentified predominantly African-American school, was to end with the two men driving toward Obama, “shooting at him from the windows,” the court documents show.

Three white supremacists with a sniper rifle and high on drugs who were arrested near the Democratic convention in Denver will not face charges even though officials believe that they wanted to assassinate Barack Obama.

The FBI and the US Secret Service carried out an “intensive” investigation into the plot — in which the supremacists talked of shooting Mr Obama as he accepted the Democratic presidential nomination in an open-air sports stadium on Thursday night — but found insufficient evidence of a “true threat”.

At the focal point, solar furnaces can achieve temperatures of 5,430 ºF (3,000 ºC). The idea is not new—coming from ancient Greece—but their potential is starting to become more relevant now as we try to cut dependency on fossil fuels.

solar power is a relatively untapped energy which is abundant. with recent developments in the manufacturing of the collectors, like nanosolar, perhaps there is hope we can figure out cheap/open solar systems.

one of the new projects is the “Multi-Robot Pursuit System”. which basically is to make a pack of robodogs to hunt down ‘a non-cooperative human subject’. Given that iRobot last year struck a deal with Taser International to mount stun weapons on its military robots, how long before we see packs of droids hunting down pesky demonstrators with paralysing weapons?

TheNaha Harbor Diner in Okinawa, Japan is a life-size rendition of a banyan tree, also known as gajumaru. The aptly-named Banyan Town shopping center near the entrance of Onoyama Park features a twenty foot tall tree with a pan-Asian restaurant nestled amid its branches. Accessible by a spiral staircase around back and an in-trunk elevator, the restaurant specializes in locally grown and organic harvested foods fresh from the farm.